An astonishing ancient tomb is Ireland's most famous prehistoric monument; Newgrange. Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Muiris O’Sullivan, an expert on the many Stone Age monuments of Ireland, including Newgrange, and they revel in the astonishing construction techniques used by ancient builders over 5,000 years ago and the intricate rock art such as the triple spiral, which has an intriguing backstory.Archeology is slowly revealing the people who built this fascinating structure, their use of sacred landscapes, and the DNA evidence linking them to other Stone Age communities.Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Nick Thomson, the producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.See the treasures of Newgrange in the new History Hit documentary; Prehistoric Ireland: Secrets of the Stone Age now. Sign up to History Hit for this and more original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on
Chapter 1: What is Newgrange and why is it significant?
I'm Tristan Hughes, your host. Today we're exploring this wonder of the Stone Age world that is Newgrange. There is still lots of mystery surrounding this massive passage tomb that has endured for five millennia. But thanks to the tireless work of archaeologists over the past decades, well, many of Newgrange's astonishing secrets have started to be revealed.
It is a fascinating structure situated at the heart of an equally fascinating landscape of the utmost prehistoric importance. And it's also the subject of a brand new documentary presented by myself that has just dropped on History Hit. It's called Prehistoric Ireland, Secrets of the Stone Age. So do check that out if you want after listening to this episode.
Our guest for this episode is Dr. Marish O'Sullivan, Emeritus Professor of Archaeology at University College Dublin. Marish is an expert on the many Stone Age monuments of Ireland, including Newgrange. He also features in our new documentary on the subject, so it felt right to have him on as our expert for this accompanying Ancients episode.
The story of Newgrange is one of stones and spirituality, of megaliths and mythology, of river travel and rock art. So let's get into it. Murrish, it is great to have you on the podcast. It's good to see you again. Thank you very much, Tristan.
It's very nice to be here as well.
Now, not only, in my opinion, are you the unofficial winner of the smoothest Irish accents that I've ever heard, but you are also an expert on Newgrange. And surely this is one of the, if not the most famous prehistoric site in Ireland?
Yeah, the most famous, I suspect, prehistoric site. It's obviously a World Heritage Site, part of a World Heritage Site, probably... maybe the best known of the three because of the solstice, which we can speak about. And Nouth would be the other great one, but Newgrange would be the one that certainly would have been the first to be well known. It was excavated in the 60s and 70s.
The excavations there began around that time, but Nouth emerged in terms of archaeological information slightly behind Newgrange in terms of information.
And in regards to that, I mean, you mentioned names there like Nouth straight away. So shall we answer the big question straight away? I mean, Marvish, what exactly is Newgrange? We can talk about Nouth as well. What exactly are these prehistoric monuments that we know the names of so well?
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Chapter 2: Who built Newgrange and what do we know about these people?
So if, whether this is a sign that they were particularly good in terms of how they managed all this process, or maybe it suggests that it wasn't along the river at all. There might be some other way they came.
We don't really know, but we know that they got the stone from A to B. It was quite a challenge because they either had to go around Dundalk Bay or go across Dundalk Bay or something like that. They had to find some way of getting the material in, you know, so it was a tricky process.
And these were enormous stones, and then they had to deal with the rivers along the way, whether they brought them along the rivers or across the rivers. But... It was massive, and this had to be done with, in the case of the Boyne Valley, I count hundreds and hundreds of large stones, each travelling individually.
And also to extract the rocks. I mean, there's no metals at this time, so is it just hammering the rock with an even bigger rock kind of thing, hammerstones again and again and again for a long time?
Hammerstones, and presumably using fire and water maybe to break them as well. But then you have to use this sort of activity carefully because... You don't want to damage the actual stone you're using or leave that all cracked and so forth, you know. So they seem to have known what they were at.
But then everything about these people tells me that they knew what they were at because the whole logistics, as you say, of bringing these large stones and extracting them and placing them in position and so forth, that was an enormous exercise.
The strange thing about it is that I always think that if you take a pebble from the seaside, a small pebble that's maybe five millimeters across or at most maybe seven or eight millimeters across, and now without modern technology, you now have the job of actually boring a hole through the center of that pebble in order to make a bead.
And I think that's an extraordinary sort of a piece of activity, so to speak, by someone back in the Stone Age. And they have done this repeatedly, so presumably they had techniques. I think if you place that then onto a larger scale with the megalithic tombs, they knew how to handle stone.
But what's maybe spectacular and maybe remarkable about all of this is that going back to their—who they were and so forth— We have no evidence that these people lived in strong houses of any type, or stone houses even in the case of Ireland.
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Chapter 3: What is the archaeological evidence of Newgrange's construction?
But these ones lift Newgrange and actually... There's certainly a curbstone 1, the entrance stone, and the one directly across from it, curbstone 52. And remember that these are the ones that are on the axis of the rising sun. And, you know, if you drew a line through the site and through the passage.
And these are probably the two finest, most, the finest pieces of megalithic art in the Boyne Valley.
There's one part of the construction of Newgrange that I'm sure many people listening to this who have visited Newgrange will be maybe shouting into their podcast, into their audio app, say, what about this? What about this part? And so I must ask about this part as well briefly. And it is interesting, which is that massive quartz wall, Marisch Wall.
Around the outside, that kind of white wall of Newgrange, that is one of the most eye-catching parts of photos and images of Newgrange today. How accurate do we think that is? Do we think that was part of the original build?
Well, I think to start, if Newgrange had been excavated in recent times and were then reconstituted, so to speak, or reinstated, we would not have that quite quartz wall. Because the system nowadays or the philosophy behind reinstating monuments after excavation is that you put it back the way you found it.
You don't try to interpret how it might have looked originally on the basis that the whole life story of the site is important. But at the time, there were very good reasons for reconstituting it in this way at the time. This was back in the 60s and 70s. O'Kelly conducted engineering experiments with engineers on how the wall might have stood and fallen and so on.
And he related that to what he found on the ground. And he certainly found all of that quartz on the ground, more or less in front of the curb at Newgrange. And the way it was sort of wedged in a sort of a wedge shape, so to speak, thinning out as it went out, suggested it had fallen from above to him. Now, it's very controversial and people have queries and questions and so on.
The interesting thing is that, as you mentioned there, that coarse wall has become so much part of Newgrange in the consciousness of people across the world at this stage. that probably it has to be left there, you know, that it was of its time. It was a way of restoring a monument at the time.
And in fairness, all of this quartz was found there, and indeed those rounded stones that are found amongst the quartz, they were all found on site, on the ground in front of the kerbstone. The one thing that might be of interest is that O'Keddie did point out that he did find stones on tops of the kerbstones.
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